Spina: A Ruby on Rails CMS

Spina has been updated a lot since I've written these articles. Commands may have changed since and I will do my best to write new articles on Spina soon !

Hi, lately I have been working on a different project that no longer requires React — neither Javascript actually. It’s a CMS built on Ruby on Rails, a kind of equivalent to Wordpress, called Spina. It’s new, it’s open-source, it’s ruby on rails and it’s awesome !

The down-side of this project is that they don’t really have any documentation yet. That’s why I’ve decided to start writing about it and even contributed to their Wiki. As I am a front-end developer, I won’t be able to talk about all the back-end ruby part. It’s going to be mainly some front-end tips and instructions to get started with Spina. You won’t find a lot of articles or tutorials about this, but the developers at Spina are very reactive and even opened a Slack channel to communicate with it’s users !

So let’s get started !

Installing Spina

Installing Spina is really easy, you only need 3 simple lines given in their Github repo.

As it’s a Ruby on Rails CMS, you obviously need to have a Rails app first. If you don’t have ruby and rails installed on your machine, I’ve given links to get your environment configured in my OSX development setup article !

If you do have Ruby on Rails working, simple create a new project.

railsnewMySpinaApp

Then simply add these lines to your Gemfile

gem'spina-template'gem'spina'

Don’t forget to bundle install !

And finally run the installation with the following command in your terminal and answer to the different questions that the command line asks you.

railsgspina:install

Now if you run rails s and open up localhost:3000 you should have your CMS running. If you want to go to the admin panel, just go to localhost:3000/admin and use the login you gave in the command line to log in !

In the next section we will see how to create a theme for our new Spina app and I will explain you how to suit your pages to your needs !